Topics

Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

Brittany Postnikoff on Security, Privacy, and Social Engineering with Robots

In this podcast, Daniel Bryant sat down with Brittany Postnikoff, a computer systems analyst specialising on the topics of robotics, embedded systems, and human-robot interaction. Topics discussed included: the rise of robotics and human-robot interaction within modern life, the security and privacy risks of robots used within this context, and the potential for robots to be used to socially engineer people.

Key Takeaways

Physical robots are becoming increasingly common in everyday life, for example, offering directions in airports, cleaning the floor in peoples’ homes, and acting as toys for children.

People often imbue these robots with human qualities, and they trust the authority granted to a robot.

Social engineering can involve the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. This can be stereotyped by the traditional “con”.

As people are interacting with robots in a more human-like way, this can mean that robots can be used for social engineering.

A key takeaway for creators of robots and the associated software is the need to develop a deeper awareness of security and privacy issues.

Software included within robots should be patched to the latest version, and any data that is being stored or transmitted should be encrypted.

Creators should also take care when thinking about the human-robot UX, and explore the potential for unintended consequences if the robot is co-opted into doing bad things.

Recommended next

About QCon

QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams. QCon takes place 8 times per year in London, New York, Munich, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Beijing, Guangzhou & Shanghai. QCon New York is at its 9th Edition and will take place Jun 15-19, 2020. 140+ expert practitioner speakers, 1000+ attendees and 18 tracks will cover topics driving the evolution of software development today. Visit qconnewyork.com to get more details.

More about our podcasts

You can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via our RSS Feed, and they are available via
SoundCloud,
Apple Podcasts,
Spotify,
Overcast
and the Google Podcast.
From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes. They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.